Asia

It is Sunday which means Eric Peters, the CIO of One River Asset Management, has published his latest weekly assortment of anecdotes and vignettes selected from the life of a hedge fund manager (always in the 3rd person), which today focuses on the quandary facing the Fed (hiking rates hurts Wall Street, but does it help Main Street?), portfolio positioning (does mean-reversion spell the end of the two best trades of the year, long EM and equities), trapped central banks and the Stockholm Syndrome (the inability by Sweden and ECB to tighten even as they forecast economic growth) and China's

All day Saturday, South Korea braced for a possible new missile test by North Korea as the provocative northern neighbor marked its founding anniversary, just days after its sixth and largest nuclear test rattled global financial markets and further escalated tensions in the region. Throughout the week, South Korean officials warned the North could launch another intercontinental ballistic missile, in defiance of U.N. sanctions and to further provoke the US. As Reuters reports, Pyongyang marks its founding anniversary each year with a big display of pageantry and military hardware.

Authored by Darius Shahtahmasebi via TheAntiMedia.org,

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said Thursday that Venezuela will be looking to “free” itself from the U.S. dollar next week, Reuters reports. According to the outlet, Maduro will look to use the weakest of two official foreign exchange regimes (essentially the way Venezuela will manage its currency in relation to other currencies and the foreign exchange market), along with a basket of currencies.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

In his latest Email article, Steen Jakobsen, Saxo Bank Chief economist and CIO has a bold prediction about interest rates.

With nearly everyone, even Janet Yellen at the Fed, predicting wage-induced inflation, Jakobsen makes a bold call in the opposite direction.

This is a guest post by Steen Jakobsen

Steen’s Chronicle: All Great Things are Simple, Except Right Now

European stocks dropped, Asian and EM market rose, and S&P were lower by 0.3% as investors assessed the latest overnight carnage in the USD which plunged to the lowest level since the start of 2015, sending the USDJPY tumbling to 107, the euro extending gains to just shy of $1.21 and a slowdown in China’s export growth which however did not prevent the Yuan from posting its best weekly gain on record.